Blog post draft team 2 (Rachel and Jay)

One of the courses Millikin University offers is IS 240 or Foundations of Information Systems. Information systems is “A combination of hardware, software, infrastructure and trained personnel organized to facilitate planning, control, coordination, and decision making in an organization”(Businessdictionary.com). This course goes over the basic principles and discusses the uses of information systems.

This course is a three-credit course and goes for an entire semester. Going into the class, a large majority of the people have no clue what information systems are. The first couple of classes are spent learning the basics of certain computer processing systems. Then the class grew into the capabilities of information systems. The professor had the class do a forum post every week as we covered a chapter in the book. The post would be based on questions that have some relation to problems and how information systems could solve them. Then the class would create a discussion through based upon the post. Once all the chapters are covered, we are assigned two projects, one group and one alone. The group project had groups of five people. The goal was to cover any topic in the technology world, describe the business potential and present the topic to the class during a fifteen-minute presentation and then answer any questions. The single person project was the same, except it was shortened from fifteen minutes to five minutes.

From the group project, many teams decided to follow the same idea and compare new products. The technology goal is to keep advancing and stay ahead of the competition. Many groups decided to see who was above their competition. Groups would get four products and one person would describe each product and its pros and cons, then the final person would say what that meant for each product and overall which product was the best. The single person project had the same concept, but a much different result. Rather than people comparing in the group project, the person picked a single technology idea and presented. There was a wide variety of presentations from printers that can be hooked up to a phone to how holograms can become a major part of the business world in the upcoming future. The overall information from the pretension gave an idea on how technology is making the world a more efficient place.

This system of having two of the same projects involving individual and group work is a great way to learn a person’s best attributes and abilities. Working on the projects allowed us to see how similar and different our view was from our classmates. The projects themselves were informative and interesting to watch. They provided a wide perspective on the world of technology and what advances and changes we can expect to see. There was a wide diversity of topics that are innovative ideas. They encourage an expansion of a person’s views and being able to see them from different people perspectives was a great way to learn and be informed on such topics.